“’Twas bound to reach us soon or late,” he said, in a steady voice. “Fancied it might leave bonnie Garth alone, but ’twas not to be. We mun just look it straight i’ the face, lass, an’ get on with our day’s work as if naught had happened.”
Cilla put an arm through her father’s. There was something vastly clean, and strong, and childlike in the yeoman’s faith; he was a man to lean upon, as Widow Mathewson would have put it.
“It’s at Ghyll, you say?” went on the farmer, after a pause. “Which of the two has caught it—the mother, or Peggy?”
“Dan didn’t say. He was so scared, poor lad, that he seemed glad to be rid of his message and away. But Reuben Gaunt is there and means to bide.”
Hirst’s temper was ruffled by his fear and the need to check it, as a strong man’s way is. “Can understand his being there—but, as for biding, Gaunt was never one to bide two minutes i’ one place, ’specially if there happened to be danger to his durned, soft body.”
“You’re wrong, father.” Cilla’s voice was warm in defence of the man who had slighted her. “He may be this and that, but not a coward. If he’d found all well at Ghyll, he might have roamed abroad; as it was, he stayed.”
“Oh, the snod ways o’ reasoning ye women have!” growled Hirst. “Dan brought false news, if he said Gaunt stayed in a fever-house. I wouldn’t do it myself, lass, and I should reckon myself a prudent man for taking to my heels. There, there! I never could bear to wrangle, least of all wi’ ye, Cilla. Come away in, and get my tea ready. I’m droughty and dry, like the roads that clem ye up wi’ dust these days.”
At Ghyll, up on the lonely moor, the hot day ended in weariness and hardship. Widow Mathewson had crept often up the stair, to see if she could help her lass. Now she and Reuben were smoking together beside the hearth. If courage needed proof, these two were finding the best gift of life—bravery won from fear. The fever was no fanciful scourge, to be tempted by encouragement into building foul nests about a house. It came like a sword that did not kill with a clean blade at once, but hacked its victims with a blunt rusty edge until the end came; and strength or weakness of the folk who met it mattered little, as with other plagues.
The widow and Reuben Gaunt smoked tranquilly by the hearth; and the quiet, hot silence lay about two folk who were learning to approve each other. The woman, after the moorland fashion, was passing the time with tales of the last visitation. It seemed to give her some relief, just as the sleepy fire of peats served, in some odd way, to cheer the sultriness which it intensified.
“Ye were in your cradle then,” she said, “an’ knew naught on’t, though it carried your mother off. Reuben, if ye ever want to know what flimsy stuff we’re made of, high and low, good ’uns an’ bad—ye’ve got to look on at a fever-time. Th’ fear seems more catching than th’ fever itseln, an’ always th’ big, hearty men catches it worst. Oh, the sights that come back to mind! Thirty-and-four year ago it war, and all comes back as plain as Peggy’s moanings up aboon us yonder.”